The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Some network devices, such as network switches, routers, edge devices and the like include policy control architectures in which one or more actions to be performed on a packet are determined based on information included in or associated with the packet. For example, such devices are sometimes configured to generate policy keys for packets based on information included in the packets, and to utilize the keys to determine actions to be performed on the packets. Such keys are typically preconfigured in the network devices such that the keys are generated using packet information extracted from predefined fixed locations in the data packets. Consequently, generation of policy keys in such network devices is relatively inflexible and provides users of the network devices very limited flexibility in implementing policy control applications.